Oracle Blog

Sathish Vaidyanathan's Weblog

Thursday Feb 28, 2008

It has been ages since I posted a blog entry and I wanted to shrug off the laziness and write about the great experiences I have had during these first two days at Sun Tech Days, Hyderabad.

I was not terribly surprised to see the turnout we had at Sun Tech Days, 2008 at Hyderabad. We saw this huge interest last year, we will see it next year as well. Engineers, SysAdmins, DB Admins, and Students flocked the Hyderabad International Convention Center showing their loyalty to Sun and inclination to understand Sun Technologies. It's a very good sign of adoption.

During his Keynote address Rich Green, Executive Vice-President of Software at Sun Microsystems, covered topics ranging from Solaris, Java, xVM, NetBeans, Glassfish, MySQL and VirtualBox. He rightly pointed out the key role played by the Indian developer community in changing the shape of what happens around the world.

For the VirtualBox Demo, Rich called me on stage to demonstrate the virtualizer software. We demoed a setup where we had VirtualBox installed on a host running Vista. On VirtualBox I had installed SXDE, Ubuntu and Indiana. We demonstrated the Java Petstore application on SXDE and how it can be accessed from Windows. We also showed Ubuntu running a netbeans app and used Ubuntu to demonstrate VirtualBox shared foldering.

There was tremendous interest in VirtualBox. Thanks to JG Kannan and Shantanu Gudihal, we might have given at least 50 demos of virtualbox at the booth over the past two days. Everyone is ready to go home, download and install VirtualBox and install OpenSolaris on it !

I also gave a talk on Sun's System Management solutions comprising of xVM Ops Center, Sun MC, SCM and N1 SPS during a Hands On Lab Session for SysAdmins. JG Kannan demonstrated xVM Ops Center to the audience and we had a healthy Q & A session that followed. At the booth, we also showed the demo of xVM Ops Center to dozens of Sys-Admins.

VirtualBox was sure enough the highlight, and there was an install fest going on at the booths to install VirtualBox and OpenSolaris on laptops of interested attendees.

Lots of them went home with the happiness of knowing all about a cool new toy in the market called 'VirtualBox', and wanted to play with it as soon as they got home.